Scientific Program & Book of Abstracts

Institute of Experimental Immunology, Universität Zürich (Switzerland) • Burkhard Becher studied Biology at the University of Cologne in Germany. He conducted his graduate studies at McGill University in Canada followed by a postdoc at Dartmouth Medical School in the US. In 2003, he was recruited as Assistant Professor by the University of Zurich and in 2008 he became professor and chairman at the Institute of Experimental Immunology, where he heads the Unit for Inflammation Research. His research focuses on communication networks in inflammation and immunotherapy. He is a continuously “highly cited scholar” since 2018, was awarded numerous prizes and honors and has been recipient of the ERC Advanced grant in 2019.

Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas (USA) • Dr. Deneen completed his undergraduate studies in Genetics at University of California Davis and focused his graduate studies at UCLA in Cancer Biology, studying pediatric sarcoma. Switching gears for his post-doctoral fellowship, Dr. Deneen studied Developmental Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology. In 2009 he started his lab at the Baylor College of Medicine in the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy and Department of Neuroscience. Over the past 14 years, Dr. Deneen’s lab has made seminal contributions to our understanding of glial development, the neuroscience of brain tumors, and glial control of brain circuit function.

LCSB – Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, The University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg) • Michael Heneka is a board-certified neurologist and clinician-scientist with over 25 years of experience in studying neurodegenerative diseases at experimental, preclinical and clinical levels. While the main focus of his work is related to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, he has also been working on ALS and Parkinson’s disease. He established a neurodegenerative outpatient unit at both the University of Münster and the University of Bonn. From 2016 to 2021, he led the department of Neurodegenerative Diseases and Geriatric Psychiatry in Bonn. Since January 2022, he is the Director of the LCSB at the University of Luxembourg and Principal Investigator.

Humanitas University, Rozzano (Italy) • Since the beginning of her career, Simona Lodato has been fascinated by how the brain develops its extraordinary cellular diversity and functional circuits. After obtaining her master’s degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Naples Federico II, where she studied the specification of cortical GABAergic interneurons, Simona pursued her PhD in Molecular Medicine at the European School of Molecular Medicine, investigating the molecular development and laminar distribution of cortical interneurons under the supervision of Michèle Studer. During her doctoral studies, she was a visiting PhD student at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she deepened her expertise in developmental neurobiology. She then completed her postdoctoral training in Paola Arlotta’s group at Harvard University in Cambridge, where she investigated how neuronal diversity in the cerebral cortex is generated and maintained, identifying gene regulatory networks driving projection neuron subtype identity. In 2018, Simona returned to Italy as Assistant Professor and Junior Group Leader at Humanitas University and Research Hospital, where she established her independent research program. Her lab combines human brain organoids, stem cell biology, and single-cell omics to unravel how genetic, activity-dependent, and environmental factors converge to shape cortical development and its dysfunction in neurodevelopmental disorders. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2021 for her project IMPACT, investigating the molecular identity of pacemaker neurons during cortical development. Simona has served as a Next Generation Leader for the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle in 2016 and in 2018 was elected a member of the FENS Kavli Network of Excellence, recognizing her contributions to neuroscience research and leadership. Since May 2023, she is Associate Professor and Group Leader at Humanitas, and in 2024 she received the European Journal of Neuroscience Special Lecture Prize at the FENS Forum in Vienna.

Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) • Edvard Moser is a Professor of Neuroscience and Scientific Director of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience (KISN) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. He is interested in neural network coding in the cortex, with particular emphasis on space, time and memory. His work, conducted in collaboration with May-Britt Moser since they started the NTNU lab in 1996, includes the discovery of grid cells, which provides clues to a mechanism for the metric of spatial mapping. Moser’s current focus is on unravelling how neural microcircuits for space and time are organized as interactions between large numbers of diverse neurons with known functional identity, a computational neuroscience endeavour that is significantly boosted by the technological development of Neuropixels probes and 2-photon miniscopes for freely-moving rodents -technologies that the Mosers have participated in developing. While the Mosers’ main focus is on the normal and healthy brain, their work has direct implications for our understanding of the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease, which at the earliest stages is characterized by neurodegeneration in the very same brain circuits for space, time and memory that Moser is investigating in normal brains.

Edvard Moser received his initial training at the University of Oslo under the supervision of Per Andersen and worked as a post-doc with Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh and John O’Keefe at the University College of London. In 1996 the Mosers accepted faculty positions in psychology at NTNU. They founded the Centre for the Biology of Memory in 2002, the Kavli Institute in 2007, the Centre for Neural Computation in 2013, and the Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex in 2023. All Centre have or have had funding from the Norwegian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence scheme. The Mosers have received numerous scientific awards, including the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.

European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Rome (Italy) • Marzia obtained her undergraduate degree in Biology and Master's degree in Genetics and Molecular Biology from Sapienza University. She graduated in 2015 with a master thesis on long non-coding RNAs in neuronal development in the group of Prof. Irene Bozzoni. Then, she worked as a Research Assistant in Prof. Richard Gregory's lab at the Boston Children's hospital, where she investigated the molecular mechanisms of RNA quality control in mouse Embryonic Stem Cells. In 2016, she joined Prof. Greg Hannon's lab at the University of Cambridge for her PhD, during which she investigated the mechanisms of transposon silencing mediated by small RNAs in the fly ovary. Since September 2020, she is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Jamie Hackett's group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Rome, where she studies mammalian oocyte epigenetics. In parallel with her activity as a scientist, since 2020 she is also a scientific illustrator. She creates cover arts and illustrations for leading journals and laboratories worldwide, using unconventional visuals to depict and communicate science.

Psykologiska Institutionen, Göteborgs Universitet (Sweden) • Dr. Gaia Olivo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research focus lies in using high-resolution MRI to assess rapid structural and functional brain plasticity in relation to learning in general and clinical settings. Dr. Olivo graduated in Medicine and Surgery at University of Naples "Federico II" in 2015, and obtained a doctorate in Medical Sciences from Uppsala University in 2019. She has published 34 papers in peer-reviewed journals, of which 15 as first author. She received the title of docent in Sweden in 2023, recognizing her scientific and pedagogical contributions. Dr. Olivo's research focuses on understanding the mechanisms behind rapid plasticity in the human brain. Her main work as P.I. investigates the time-course, maintenance, and individual predictors of brain plasticity using ultra-high resolution MRI at 7 Tesla for human subjects and 9.4 Tesla for rodent models, during fine motor skill learning. In addition, Dr. Olivo collaborates on several projects examining synaptic plasticity in mild neurocognitive disorders, brain development in children with developmental dyslexia, and functional changes during motor skill acquisition. She is also involved in studying post-surgical outcomes in patients with low-grade gliomas, particularly regarding executive functions.

Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy) • My long-term interest is to understand the formation of brain circuits in typical development and in models of neurodevelopmental disorders. My approach is to combine electrophysiological and imaging techniques with molecular studies. My group has a longstanding expertise in such experiments on cortical plasticity in mice and we are fully equipped to carry them out here in my laboratory. We routinely use electrophysiology, optical and two-photon imaging to characterize structural and functional plasticity. My work has mainly been focused on the visual system, in which I had identified in 2002 that perineuronal nets (PNNs) are a brake for ocular dominance plasticity maturing at the end of the critical period. This paper opened the field of PNNs in plasticity (commented in PNAS by the Nobel prize winner Roger Tsien in 2013) and has also been influential in the field of Rett Syndrome (RTT) (papers by the groups of Shea, Fagiolini, Dudek and Zhuang). For these studies I received the international Schellenberg Award from the IRP/IFP in Geneva. My prominent role in this field is also shown by the invitation to make a commentary in Science (2009) and a review in Nature Neuroscience Reviews. In parallel, I elucidated the role of BDNF and important signaling epigenetic processes involving microRNAs, DNA methylation, MeCP2 and histone postranslational modifications in experience-dependent development of the visual cortex. This work was published in high impact journal, such as Science, Cell, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience. I have last-authored many papers on RTT and CDKL5 deficiency syndrome (CDD) characterizing the alterations present in the mouse models at synaptic level. I also coordinated research projects on CDD funded by private Foundations such as Telethon, LouLou foundation, and the International foundation for CDKL5 research. I have discovered that CDKL5 mice display visual deficits depending on CDKL5 action in visual cortical cells and he characterized the natural history of the deficit. Moreover, I discovered a selective stability deficit of dendritic spines using in vivo 2-photon imaging and alteration in glutamatergic synaptic transmission and plasticity. I am regularly invited to the international meetings and forums on CDD and has organized symposia at international meetings on this disease (IBRO 2019, CDKL5 Asia meeting Tokyo 2019).